Pilots are facing a number of issues in the flight deck today. Industry and research organizations have been observing that procedural complexity is pushing past the limits of human capacity and part time automation is creating a crisis in the cockpit and eroding skills. Additionally, the trend has been to add systems and sensors leaving pilots to integrate and monitor information, and airplane system integration is going up while pilot system knowledge is going down. Too much to do without enough time, tools or resources leads to the inability to focus, assess risk, and manage threats and errors. Distractions result in a loss of situational awareness and continue to be the most pervasive human threat to safety. Situation awareness (SA) is being aware of what is happening around you and understanding what that information means to you now and in the future.
The underlying trend is that pilots are having greater difficulty in creating and maintaining a sufficient level of situation awareness, especially when it comes to aircraft systems and aircraft intent. The pilot can be severely challenged in rapidly bringing all of the available information together in a form that is manageable for making accurate decisions in a timely manner. It is becoming widely recognized that more data does not equal more information.
Currently implemented user interfaces are not designed around situation awareness and do not permit the flight crew to effectively manage the information available to gain a high level of understanding of what is happening.
Research indicates that people will act first to classify and understand a situation. The appropriate internal mental model (from training and/or experience) will then trigger a response leading to action. Situation Awareness becomes a key feature that dictates the success of the decision process. Pilots should go beyond simple perception of the state of their environment (both inside and outside the aircraft) and should understand the integrated meaning of what they are perceiving in light of their goals. Currently implemented user interfaces are not effective at creating a high level of situation awareness.
The perception of time and the temporal dynamics of information also come into play with situation awareness. Understanding how much time is available until an event occurs or an action is required occupies an important role. The ability to project the current situation into the future requires a highly developed mental model of system behavior, supported by situation awareness. By constantly projecting ahead, the pilot is able to develop a ready set of strategies and responses to potential events.
While the underlying information content of today's flight deck is sufficient for supporting the flight crew's situation awareness, the architecture and organizational schemes for the information are inadequate. In fact, certain elements of temporal information, as it relates to the flight plan, are currently hidden from the flight crew and only used as “internal” parameters. Currently implemented decision support tools are primarily aimed at avoiding external hazards (e.g., weather, terrain, traffic) and supporting flight plan re-routes rather than supporting flight crew situation awareness.